Competition
Our platform spans several markets from cloud computing and cloud security to CDNs. We segment the competitive landscape into four key categories:
•Legacy CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, EdgeCast (part of Verizon Digital Media), Level3, and Imperva (for security); •Small business focused CDNs like InStart, Cloudflare, StackPath, and Section.io; •Cloud providers who are starting to offer compute functionality at the edge like Amazon’s CloudFront, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Platform; and •Traditional data center and appliance vendors like F5, Citrix, A10 Networks, Cisco, Imperva, Radware, and Arbor, as well as networks that offer a range of on-premise solutions for load balancing, WAF, and DDoS.
Maybe Fastly will give legacy players a run for their money.
AWS, GCP, and Azure have CDNs as well, but those are more typically used by existing customers to front things running there.
Fastly has deployments in 17 north american cities. AWS is in 5.
They're pretty different strategies. For every massive AWS datacenter on a continent, fastly has at least 3 tiny ones -- inevitably closer to your customers, meaning lower RTT.
One related gripe I have with Firebase Hosting is that it refuses to renew certificates if you also add IPv6 addresses.
"Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider. Fastly's edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services"
Just judging by that statement, I feel they're going to be eaten by AWS, GCP, and maybe Azure. However, it seems their focus may be on creating a viable business, rather than trying to spin an open-source project into a business (e.g., Docker Cloud). We already see that Docker is losing business to people using the OSS, but paying Amazon or Google for ECR and GCR, respectively.
That being said, there are some smaller somewhat related players, such as PagerDuty that seem to be off to a good start. Twilio's stock has performed well historically, too, as has Splunk. But these later companies seem to be solving problems that make them less direct competitors with the bigger players.